Bill James quotes

There will always be people who are ahead of the curve, and people who are behind the curve. But knowledge moves the curve. (Bill James)

Standardization leads to rigidity, and rigidity causes things to break.

Bill James

Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.

Bill James

Do we need to have 280 brands of breakfast cereal? No, probably not. But we have them for a reason - because some people like them. It's the same with baseball statistics.

Bill James

It's extremely damaging to a fair trial to have people reaching judgment about the case in the newspapers and on the radio before the facts are heard in a case.

Bill James

I try to take large, general questions that are difficult to resolve and break them down into small, very specific questions that have clear answers.

Bill James

You can't ultimately dodge defeat by winning close elections.

Bill James

Well, stealing bases adds some runs but very few, and you lose most of the runs that you gain by having runners caught stealing.

Bill James

I have always been much better at asking questions than knowing what the answers were.

Bill James

The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It's how we expose police misconduct.

Bill James

I do have a family, and obviously I spend as much time as I can with them. Though even when I'm with my family, my mind tends to drift toward baseball. (Bill James)

When people disagree with you, what you ultimately have to do is persuade people to agree with you - period.

Bill James

The human race has been in a long struggle to eliminate murder. And we will succeed.

Bill James

The fact is that everybody around a college basketball game - the coaches, the announcers, even the referees at a lower level - calculates when the game is really over. They calculate it with intuition and guesswork.

Bill James

Professionalism in medicine has given us medial miracles for the affluent but hospitals that will charge $35 for aspirin.

Bill James

Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws.

Bill James

I would never encourage my children to be athletes - first because my children are not athletes and second because there are so many people pushing to get to the top in sports that 100 people are crushed for each one who breaks through. This is unfortunate.

Bill James

You know one little way in which baseball changes us? We don't even think twice about Japanese names anymore. You know what I mean?

Bill James

Serial murders are just the worst stories. It can take an emotional toll on you.

Bill James

Television is full of fictional and real violence that's turned into entertainment.

Bill James

In a crime story, the details become tremendously important - where the staircase was in relation to the bed, for example. (Bill James)

There are, I believe, many more false confessions to murders than true confessions.

Bill James

When I was a small kid, I grew up in the newspapers.

Bill James

I like to feel that I understand little things about sports.

Bill James

It's easy for people to grow up in our society believing that certain lifestyles are risk free when they certainly are not.

Bill James

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Bill James

Bill James - Image

Photo: Colette Morton and Dan Holden, CC BY-SA 2.0

Occupation: American Writer
Born: October 5, 1949
Quotes count: 34
Wikipedia: Bill James

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